Rob Robertson
& his Story
His Emotional Fitness Journey
This site has been created for Rob Robertson and below we share his journey. How self-doubt, abuse and anxiety inspired him along the journey to discover Emotional Fitness, in order to build his resilience to gain a healthy self-esteem, true inner trust and freedom. To live his dreams that always had previously seemed a disconnected reality.
Robert is an Entrepreneur, Author, Meditation Teacher and Mental Skills Coach specialising in the Emotional Fitness empowering high-performance business and sports performance.
Roberts biggest gifts have come from the learning resulting from sexual abuse as a 7-year-old. This has driven his fascination with personal motivation, emotions and mental skills to learn the best techniques to release anger and self-doubt. Those tools and associated lessons have led to Robert being recognised as an Emotional Fitness pioneer. The result is today he feels very grateful for the huge benefits this experience has taught him. Having experienced both sides of the self-esteem divide, Robert is very passionate about helping people grow by teachings others what has worked for him. While he is always learning anything he can about emotions, the impact has been a massive personal transformation and vastly higher mental toughness in sport.
His love of sport started as a naive 11-year-old country boy growing up in the farming town of Methven, New Zealand. At that age, he was selected for the Mid-Canterbury rep soccer team. While very proud of the achievement, he felt out of his depth at this higher level. This massive self-doubt was reflected in not excelling under pressure. Then a similar situation occurred a few years later, when selected to play tennis for Mid-Canterbury, massive self-doubt again stifled his performance. These experiences helped trigger his thirst to learn everything he could about growing his inner confidence, to release self-doubt and gain the high-performance advantage in sport, then later apply this to business.
A major junction was leaving home as a 17-year-old to live at Lincoln University in the halls of residence, in New Zealand. After a number of consecutive nights with ZERO sleep, considerable relief was found when a counsellor labelled his knotted stomach as anxiety. During that first year away from home, the anxiety became depression, providing a massive reality check on real life and the transition to becoming an adult.
Part of this journey is explained in the following 10-minute TED-style talk recorded on the 1st of August 2017 in Auckland. In this talk, Rob Robertson shares his Emotional Fitness journey, which is followed by 9 minutes of questions about Emotional Fitness.
Making it through year one of University with these huge emotional ups and downs was only made bearable with the critical support of a counsellor. Then things really changed in year two, after completing a 4-week Mind Power course by John Kehoe, as positive thinking changed everything.
The next ten years using positive thinking provided an escape from the reality of mental illness, although at a price. By turning everything into a positive in the head, an unrealistic positive thinker was born. This seemed like the answer to everything. Inner freedom to be able to escape from the uncomfortable emotions he was experiencing. To feel safe in the head. While providing a reasonable level of success in sport and business, true consistency was lacking due to his hidden unconscious self-doubt. Which was a reflection on the theory that we don’t get what we want in life, we get what our unconscious ‘stuff’ creates.
Then in 2001, it all changed by discovering huge anger and suppressed emotions that had been entirely hidden by the positive thinking. This anger was in some part created from 10 years of turning every negative feeling into a positive in the head, suppressing any negative emotions. This massive discovery was incredibly scary, as he felt huge anger, after ten years of being positive and only allowing positive feelings. This huge turning point was the start of an incredible Emotional Fitness journey, learning to fully connect and understand emotions.
In 2001, after uncovering all this suppressed anger, his Emotional Fitness journey led him to a Men’s Anger Group, when living in Sydney, Australia. It was a wonderful support network despite the Police sending a number of the participants to this group to get help. This was the start of an interesting journey opening up hidden anger, sadness and some challenging lows. This learning and his fascination with understanding all he could from countless personal development programs around emotions and the power of the heart, has provided the key insights for developing the Emotional Fitness Workout.
More recently, it was early 2017 when real evolution becomes more obvious. The shift from self-doubt and low self-esteem, to a more healthy self-understanding and belief, was evident in his more relaxed inner calm and greater self-belief. It was no accident that it coincided with his business taking off, stepping full-time into his work as a Mental Skills Coach and Trainer.
Further evidence of his journey into new bounds of Emotional Fitness was in mid-2017 when he noticed the ongoing anxiety of the first half of 2017 had subsided. The Emotional Fitness Workout had helped him process this anxiety for wonderful new personal growth. Resulting in an important milestone on the Emotional Fitness journey, to release the pattern of anxiety to reach a new level of inner calm and connected peace. This was shown by a much healthier inner self belief and self esteem. With a new zest, passion and excitement in the way he spoke and connected with people.
To read more, visit http://www.robertcrobertson.com/ which contains his personal blog. Click here for an example of one of his blog post, sharing his new found vulnerability about the struggles of this Emotional Fitness journey.
True emotional strength is about being real, not afraid to say the truth, to be vulnerable if appropriate, and of course honest. This is the real strength that is still relatively new for Robert C Robertson. True strength is not the hard guy cover up our emotions, to be a brave man type of strength, but true inner strength is to be real in our emotional expression. To love life, both the highs and also to embrace the lows, to live with passion, purpose and real heart.
Emotional Flow
“The heart is seen as the seat of connection between the mind and the body, forming a bridge between the two. The mind or spirit is housed in the heart, and the blood vessels are the communication channels that carry the heart’s vital, rhythmic messages throughout the body.”
– Chinese Medicine, 2500 B.C.
Throughout history people have referred to the heart in ways that imply it has a natural intelligence.
Cultures around the world use metaphors expressing how the heart is more than a pump: Follow your heart. In your heart you know. Put your heart into it. Even our 21st century dictionaries refer to the heart as the centre of the personality.
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched…they must be felt with the heart” – Quote from an unknown source.
Good Emotional Fitness is shown as a natural state of “flow.” The term “flow” was first defined by Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who earned his fame by providing a detailed description of the “flow” state. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living psychologists of our age.
We are all capable of reaching this state he calls “flow” which is an effortless concentration and enjoyable, connected state of mind, body and emotional “flow.”
Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model refers to the mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level and how it relates to happiness.